


All You've Got

by GigglingGriffin



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, gen - Freeform, sort of melancholy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 16:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1863930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GigglingGriffin/pseuds/GigglingGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sadie and Lars are friends. They're each others' only friends, actually, and Lars can't help falling for his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All You've Got

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: Wow haha I've only posted one fic on this site and it isn't even canon anymore isn't that funny haha fuck

Sadie looked down at him. Lars was lying in a pile of trash, his knees and elbows scuffed with sand and dirt and probably blood, his tee shirt ripped, and his entire body slightly tinted black and brown. His hair was flopped over his face and he was drooling a little bit. He gritted his teeth and opened his eyes, smiling for a millisecond before scowling at her and flushing a little.  
“Well?” he asked. “Are you gonna help me up?”  
She reached down and yanked him up so his momentum smashed them together, and then steadied him on his feet.  
He gave her a look, hurt and angry and noncommittal. “Ow.”  
“Weenie.”  
“Hey!” he shouted, stuttered, and giggled.  
She punched his arm.  
“Hey!” he exclaimed again.  
“That’s what you get for not telling me you were going to go confront Buck Dewey!” she yelled, clenching her hands into fists and standing on her toes to really look at him. He didn’t respond. “You told me you would tell me if you wanted to talk to him!”  
“It wasn’t any of your beeswax, Sadie.”  
“YOU’RE my beeswax, you jerk! What, are you embarrassed about me? Am I some girl who isn’t your mom who can’t tell you what to do?!”  
“Ow, yes, kind of!” he said, pushing her away. She was pummeling into his side, crying a little. “Get off!” he laughed.  
“You can’t just go and get yourself beat up, Lars!” She was standing apart from him now, her eyes, fists, mouth, and whole body clenched up. “You have to take care of yourself...” And here, she paused, trying to find the right words. “Because that’s part of taking care of other people.”  
He didn’t know how to respond to that, so he didn’t. They stood there for a little while until Sadie roughly grabbed his arm. “Let’s go,” she said, so they did.

Sadie sort of saw it coming. They were sitting on the couch, watching bad television, when, as they were laughing, Lars pointed at the screen and rested his hand on hers. She looked at it, like it offended her with its presence, but also like she wanted it to be there so she could know what would happen next.  
He looked at her, trying to gauge her opinion of the thing, then leaned in slightly, cautiously, “you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to”, and she decided that she wanted to because he was being so nice about it. They kissed for a moment, and it wasn’t really bad, but it wasn’t really great either, and when he leaned in a bit harder, she pulled away, breathing little invisible puffs.  
“Was it...” he asked, and trailed off, too afraid to continue.  
“No,” she answered. “I just...”  
“Yeah?” he asked, almost a statement and almost a question, too unsure to be either.  
“I don’t think, well,” she began, and then couldn’t continue, because there wasn’t anything to continue.  
“Yeah,” he said, and turned away, scratching his head with one gangly arm. “It was kind  
of... weird.”  
“Well, not really,” Sadie interjected, because she didn’t want him to feel bad, but not because it wasn’t weird. It wasn’t really weird though, it just wasn’t... correct.  
He stared at her, an odd expression on his face. She finally deciphered that he thought she wanted to kiss again, so she blushed and shook her head.  
“No, no, no, Lars, I don’t... I don’t want to be in a relationship with you.”  
“Okay,” he said, and giggled awkwardly. “Who said anything about a relationship, though?”  
Sadie reflected his earlier stare and sighed, curling up against him. He was bony and lean, but his contours were elegant and fit against her. “Maybe later,” she mumbled, over the lull of Survivor.  
“Maybe later...” he trailed off, smiling at the thought. He crooked his neck over her pillowy hair and felt like that sounded right.

Sadie was standing over his seemingly dead body again, seething. She grabbed his collar and pulled it toward her face.  
“DO YOU LIKE HURTING ME LIKE THIS?!” she screamed, and he jolted awake.  
“Aah, Sadie,”  
“DO YOU WANT TO GET HURT? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!” she yelled, and started bawling. “I know Buck Dewey isn’t a bad guy, he wouldn’t do this to you if you didn’t provoke him, what are you doing to make him hurt you?!”  
“So you just assume that this is my fault?!” Lars yelled, and pushed her away. “Sadie, you can’t just guilt me out of my actions. I don’t do what I do to hurt you. Do you understand that?”  
Sadie nodded. She shouldn’t have said that, she shouldn’t have said that, she-  
“You can’t guilt trip me into taking care of myself by pulling yourself into the equation,” he said, and his voice was hard, warm, and gray. “You know I care about you too much. That’s only going to hurt me back.”  
She looked at her feet because they weren’t difficult to have to see.  
“Do you want to hurt me back, Sadie?” he asked, and it wasn’t passive aggressive, it was just a question, why was it just a question, not passive aggressive, it really was just a question then, wasn’t it?  
“No, I don’t,” she said, because questions need answers.  
He looked at her and she looked back and he tried doing that thing he’d tried doing three months ago where he moved his head in close and he closed his eyes and he parted his lips and it could have looked terrible but it didn’t, and she grabbed his face and looked him in the eye.  
“But what did you do to Buck Dewey?”  
“I said a lot of things that I’m not proud of saying because sometimes I flash up. You know how I get,” he said.  
“And he beat you to a pulp?”  
“Yes.”  
She started crying, water burbled out of her like it does in a Studio Ghibli movie, thick, clear and unbelievably heavy, he could see it right up close since her hands were still squished into his cheeks, he kissed her and he kissed her tears and he kissed her cheeks and it made him feel a lot better than it did her.  
Her arms fell from their position over his cheeks limp, without a place to be, so his gently moved hers into his own, drawing circles on them with his thumbs. When he was done with that, she played with the belt loops on his jeans and he let out a harsh breath.  
“Oh my GOD, Sadie-” he said. She looked at him like he was really gross. “What?”  
“What did you think I was gonna do, drop your pants?” she asked, probably too loudly.  
“What? No!” he cried, and she turned away and walked off.  
“Hang on, Sadie-” Lars said, and ran to catch up.

Sadie didn’t really want this to happen. She saw this coming too, and she didn’t say anything against it, but when he leaned her into the crook of the couch, peppering her with tickles and tickling kisses while she guffawed and kicked at him when he touched a sensitive spot, she wasn’t sure that she was perfectly okay with it, and as he kissed her, nestled into the armrest all warm and cozy, she decided that she didn’t want to be doing this and whispered it at him.  
“What?” he asked, his voice loud and big.  
“I said that I don’t want to do this,” Sadie repeated.  
“Why? What are you, a dyke?!” he shouted, and then flinched at his own words. She looked at him, slapped him, and scooted out of the couch from under his body and the sound of The Bachelorette in the distance.  
“Sadie, wait-” he said, but she was grabbing her coat and putting on her shoes.  
“Sadie, please-” he followed, but she was halfway out the door.  
“Sadie, don’t-” but she was in her car, halfway down the driveway. He bounded toward her, latching onto the car’s slightly open window. “Sadie!” he cried, and she screamed and slammed the breaks.  
“Please don’t do this, please wait, Sadie, I’m so sorry for what I said, I just think I’m in love with you and I get it, I’m a big jerk, I shouldn’t be so quick to retort, please don’t go.”  
“I’m all you’ve got, Lars!” she shouted. “I’m all you’ve got, and you’re all I’ve got, and we can’t RUIN that, okay?”  
He looked like a hurt puppy. “What is that supposed to mean?”  
“It means that I don’t want to see you anymore. Maybe for a month, maybe for a week, maybe forever, but I don’t want you to call my house or to come over to my house, or to treat me like this at work, or to EXPLOIT me like you’ve been doing recently, okay?”  
He was going to shout something, she just knew it, but he swallowed it back and consented. “Okay.”  
“Goodbye, Lars,” she said. She pulled out of the driveway and drove off, leaving him standing there with an empty house behind him and an empty future ahead.

Sadie was seeing the mailman, Lars was pretty sure. It had been about two months after her driving away when he saw her with her entire body sticking out of his mail truck at 30 mph, scream laughing down the boardwalk. It had been two months and two days after her telling him he’d fucked up when he saw them walking down the beach, chasing seagulls and kicking the waves. It had been about two months and four days after he realized that he’d fucked up when he went up to Jamie as his mail was being delivered and asked him about the situation.  
“I don’t really know, Lars,” the Persian responded, scratching at his hair. “I really like her, but I don’t know if we’re dating. I think she just needs a friend in her life.”  
“You really like her, huh?” Lars growled, slouched over and bitter.  
“Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty obvious why, isn’t it?” He gave Lars a toothy grin.  
“Now, listen here, you LITTLE SHIT-” Lars grabbed at the mail boy's collar and pulled it toward him, swinging his arm back to punch.  
“She talks about you, you know,” said Jamie, his voice pretty devoid of fear. “She talks about how she misses you, how she worries about you all the time, and how she wishes that you could have just been friends.”  
Lars’ arm grew limp and he let the mailman go. “She does?”  
“Lars, she isn't interested in me. She’s more interested in you than she is in me, and if you ever get to see her again, you had better not screw it up.” Jamie’s stance was now powerful as he looked at the boy. “I will not let you make her cry over you again.”  
“Yeah, yeah,” Lars grumbled, because he’d always had a problem with authority figures, and he had a problem with Sadie relying on his emotions for her own.  
“All right.” Jamie turned to leave, then looked back at Lars. “Lars,” he said.  
“What?” the boy asked.  
“She’s never going to want to kiss you. You shouldn't go on with your life believing that eventually, she’s going to want to kiss you, because it’s not true. You can’t manipulate her into that. Be what she wants out of you and you’ll be her friend, and that’s the best thing in the world you can be.”  
“Yeah, yeah,” Lars answered, watching the truck drive next door.

A month after, three months and four days from the fucking up, Lars got a text from Sadie to meet at the hill where he’d almost died, where Steven’d let him take the credit. She was sitting on the hood of her beat up old car, her hands stuffed in her pockets and her shoulders around her ears. Lars walked up next to her, but didn’t sit down, because the hood would get even more dented and because he was scared to, so she stood up and walked to the ledge to sit down.  
She didn’t dangle her legs over it, but sat cross legged, sticking her hands into the crevices behind her knees, and looking out. Lars looked out too.  
“Are we okay?” he asked, and she nodded, not quite looking at him because he was difficult to have to see. He smiled and hugged her from the side so her arm got in the way, then swung his feet back and forth over the ledge. “I love you, Sadie,” he said, and she looked at him.  
“I’m all you’ve got, Lars,” she told him. “You’re all I’ve got.”  
“Yeah, well you’re all mine,” he said happily, and she didn’t correct him.

**Author's Note:**

> I have rewritten that last clause in the summary around fifty billion times and it will never sound good! Unless someone would be willing to help me with it. Please.
> 
> Also, why can't don't my tabs work? My paragraphs are not indented. This is despicable. Why is this happening. Aaaa.


End file.
